A customer relationship management (CRM) system is generally a system to manage customer and client relationships, among other things. Applied properly, it can help improve the productivity of a sales team. Unfortunately, traditional CRM systems cannot meet all the needs of a modern sales team.
For example, because of the manner in which certain information is handled, certain information can be lost upon the occurrence of critical events. For example, in certain CRM systems when information for a prospective customer (e.g., lead) is converted into an actual customer (e.g., contact) critical information may be lost. For example, on average, 25-50% of the time companies using a traditional CRM system will convert their leads into contacts. But if a lead is not converted into an opportunity, certain CRM systems cannot connect or track revenue credit to a marketing campaign. This is a significant problem for revenue attribution to marketing campaigns. For example, in traditional CRM systems, the results of many leads in a system may not be well understood.
Also, traditional CRM systems do not keep a historical record of individual events such as responses to determine their effect on a final outcome such as a sale or lost sale. For example, traditional CRM systems may not provide fully descriptive information about the performance of a past marketing campaign. Certain CRM systems may only provide the current status of a lead and lose visibility into the status of the lead during post-campaign follow up, for example.
Traditional CRM systems also may not track whether a response is a new response or one from an existing list of responses. This can be important information to consider. For example, it may be important to know if the pool of contacts is fixed or if new prospects are being reached.
Using conventional CRM systems, it can be difficult to attribute customer revenue to specific sales and marketing campaigns. For example, conventional CRM systems may seek to attribute revenue by using information related to customer purchases in order to determine whether one or more campaigns were influential in bringing about a sale. This approach, however, is suffers from certain problems. For example, the information that is chosen to be used for attribution can be arbitrary without firm foundation as a true indicator of influence. The chosen information may be based on limited data captured for a specific sale such that the attribution information is limited. In certain conventional applications, all of a given sale may be attributed to every campaign to which a customer responded leading to incorrect results.
A conventional CRM system can record a person's activity or response to a sales or marketing campaign in an object that references the person and the sales or marketing campaign. In many cases, however, only a single such object is allowed between a given customer and sales or marketing campaign. In such a situation, additional activities or responses between a customer and sales or marketing campaign are not recorded. Alternatively, a response is updated with new information but old response information is lost. A result is that incomplete and inaccurate data is captured for a repeat activity or response to a sales or marketing campaign. For example, where no repeat responses are recorded, users of a CRM system cannot get an accurate measurement of their marketing campaigns or other activities.